Fabio Capello's crime was simply to reiterate loyalty

Can you imagine a club manager, if left unconsulted as the board removed the captaincy from a senior player, being cast as the villain of the piece? Especially if manager and board had hitherto stood behind the captain on a principle enshrined not in the ebb and flow of events but our society's unwritten constitution?

When the manager is Fabio Capello and the player John Terry, the rules change and even those of us who no more agreed with Capello's appointment - England would be better off failing under an English manager than trying to buy success, for too many reasons to list here - than his choice of Terry as captain find it tawdry.

All Capello did on Italian television was reiterate loyalty and, to give the FA their due, there have been no splutterings of outrage from Wembley. Not identifiable, anyway, although you can always find a self-important source willing to leak: a habit bizarrely considered less objectionable than Capello's honest dissent.

David Bernstein knows the score. The FA chairman is aware that the goalposts have been moved not by Capello but the court which deferred Terry's case until after the European Championship.

We know Chelsea wanted that. It was the FA's job to discover Terry's position and, if it concurred with the club's, why. Then an informed view could have been taken and explained in public.

If Terry and his lawyers were instrumental in persuading Westminster magistrates to defer, the player was, in effect, ruling himself out of Euro 2012 (this attempt to separate the captaincy is surely the ultimate hypocrisy).

If Capello didn't like that, so be it. There is always another captain, always another manager.

But the FA must find a sharper footballing intellect. When they acquired two new directors last year, they picked a woman and man of substance: worthies who know their way around a boardroom table. There is more to life than that.